South Africa's President Legitimizes Anti-Migrant Movement Through High-Profile Engagement

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa shook hands with two leaders of the “Abahambe” (They must go) campaign last week, a gesture that cultural historian Fezokuhle Mthonti describes as a defining signal of how far the current wave of anti-migrant violence has moved into the mainstream. Ramaphosa urged peaceful conduct while meeting the protest leaders, an act that, in Mthonti’s reading, marks this moment as categorically different from earlier cycles of xenophobic unrest.

The scale and character of the current campaign differ markedly from previous incidents. Xenophobic riots have occurred periodically in South Africa since 1994, killing 703 people in total. This iteration, Mthonti argues, carries new dimensions: it is well-funded, legitimized by mainstream media coverage, and has drawn direct engagement from the government itself. “This is a new moment,” she says.

The consequences are already severe. Thousands of African migrants are sleeping on pavements, afraid to return to their homes. At least four people have died in the violence. Governments from Malawi, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe have begun arranging the return of tens of thousands of their citizens, a grim acknowledgment of the security crisis unfolding inside South Africa’s borders.

The roots of this xenophobia run deep into the country’s particular historical and political circumstances. Mthonti argues that Black South Africans occupy a fragile position within their own nation. Although they became citizens in 1994, that citizenship has never felt fully secure. The promises of post-apartheid transformation have not materialized for poor and rural communities, leaving them economically vulnerable and psychologically unsettled. When global economic crises emerge, Mthonti observes, societies often turn toward scapegoating. In South Africa’s case, that tendency is sharpened by the country’s history of systemic violence and the resulting instability of national identity.

The state’s withdrawal from its role as provider of economic security and services has left communities to fend for themselves. Both South African citizens and migrants, Mthonti notes, are “the same folks who are trying to eke out an existence together” in the face of state abandonment. This proximity makes the violence more intimate and troubling. Neighbors are turning on neighbors as political rhetoric constructs divisions between “us” and “them.”

The irony is stark. South Africa’s wealth was built on migration and migrant labor. The mining industry that created modern Johannesburg depended on indentured workers brought from elsewhere. Sandton, in north Johannesburg, stands as Africa’s wealthiest square mile, a monument to capital accumulated through forced labor and migration. Cape Town and Durban share similar histories. The nation’s prosperity is inseparable from the movement of people across borders.

By contrast, South Africa’s vulnerability to such violence stems from an accumulation of historical traumas that few nations can claim simultaneously: colonialism, slavery, and apartheid. This layering of devastation has left profound scars. South Africa did not end apartheid until 1994, decades after most African nations achieved independence. In the 1960s, when African countries were consolidating post-colonial identities and developing racial self-esteem, South Africans were excluded from that process entirely.

After apartheid’s formal end, the country attempted to adopt a neoliberal order as though beginning anew, without reckoning with the ethnic and tribal divisions that apartheid had constructed. Those divisions have now resurfaced in xenophobic form. The logic used to divide South Africans internally is being repackaged to exclude other Africans. Even the Tsonga people, an ethnic minority present in South Africa for centuries, face violence and exclusion because they are deemed illegitimate to the South African project. Mthonti states plainly: “This is a function of apartheid.”

The current moment also reflects global currents. Anti-migrant sentiment has risen worldwide, championed by leaders including Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, and Narendra Modi. Within South Africa, a particular psychological distance has emerged between Black South Africans and other Africans. The country remains the continent’s wealthiest nation, with the highest concentration of dollar millionaires and a Black middle class that has expanded significantly since 2012. That relative affluence has created separation.

Mthonti cautions against overstating the divide, though. Despite South Africa’s wealth, GDP growth stands just above 1 percent. Material insecurity pervades the country. The gap between the South Africa people imagine and the one they experience remains vast.

She also resists the common framing that poor people are inherently xenophobic or that poverty naturally produces bigotry. State failure and political scapegoating are the drivers, she argues, not poverty itself. More South Africans support pan-African unity than oppose it. The xenophobia is not inevitable but constructed, a product of deliberate choices by those in power to deflect blame for their own failures onto vulnerable outsiders. Whether South Africa’s institutions will hold those decision-makers to account for the conditions they have created remains the open question.